Weekend tech reading: Rockstar's GTA V FAQ, how to back up and purge Gmail, Yahoo under Mayer

Asked & answered: GTA V first person experience, online heists and much more In the time since Grand Theft Auto V's release on new generation platforms, we've received lots of questions from the community about what is in store for the future, including the highly anticipated launch of Online Heists, which was discussed in yesterday's IGN interview. Today, we've got a special Asked & Answered that addresses this and many other frequently asked questions we've seen recently. Rockstar

How much your inbox is worth to cybercriminals Many of us have had the experience of receiving a spammy email from a friend or loved one, only to have a frantic follow-up note arrive a few minutes later from that person stating that hisor her email account was hacked and warning us not to open or respond to any of the messages sent by the intruder. To be sure, this is an alarming situation for many users. Gizmodo (also, LifeHacker's guide on automatically backing up and purging Gmail)

Programming and programming languages Many people would regard this as being two books in one. One book is an introduction to programming, teaching you basic concepts of organizing data and the programs that operate over them, ending in the investigation of universally useful algorithms. The other book is an introduction to programming languages: a study, from one level up, of the media by which we structure these data and programs. Brown University

Material question Until Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment in which he used electromagnets to levitate a frog. Geim, born in 1958 in the Soviet Union, is a brilliant academic -- as a high-school student, he won a competition by memorizing a thousand-page chemistry dictionary -- but he also has a streak of unorthodox humor. The New Yorker

What happened when Marissa Mayer tried to be Steve Jobs Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked "publish" on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, to turn around the enormous yet floundering Internet company.The NY Times

The cabal: Valve's design process for creating Half-Life While Half-Life has seen resounding critical and financial success (winning over 50 Game of the Year awards and selling more than a million copies worldwide), few people realize that it didn’t start out a winner -- in fact, Valve's first attempt at the game had to be scrapped. It was mediocre at best, and suffered from the typical problems that plague far too many games. Gamasutra

Making the Internet a utility -- what's the worst that could happen? There seems to be nothing the broadband industry fears more than Title II of the Communications Act. Title II gives the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate telecommunications providers as utilities or "common carriers." Like landline phone providers, common carriers must offer service to the public on reasonable terms. Ars Technica

Far Cry 4: outposts only, permadeath, no bullets, no minimap, no shopping I love taking over outposts in Far Cry 3 and 4. Allowing for a variety of tactics and often devolving into highly improvisatory pyrotechnics, the outposts represent everything I like about the Far Cry series' unpredictable gunplay. After beating the main plot and defeating all the outposts and strongholds, I wanted to replay the game with some random restrictions. No Wrong Way To Play

The everything book: Reading in the age of Amazon Chris Green holds an envelope. At least, it looks like an envelope. In reality, it's a piece of office copy paper that's been cut and folded into the shape of a Kindle Voyage, the latest in Amazon's bestselling line of e-readers. Green, the head industrial designer at Lab126, the secret lab where Kindles are designed, unfolds the paper to show it has been stuffed with everything that makes a Kindle: a CPU, a modem, a battery. The Verge

We're paying for broken games, and it's unacceptable There was a time when you bought a game, pulled it out of the box, popped it into your device of choice, and that was it. In today's video game industry, however, a single game isn't even the end product. Now we have downloadable content and expansion packs -- and don't forget to buy the season pass so you get it all for a nominal discount. Joystiq

Multiple broadband routers use vulnerable versions of Allegro RomPager Many home and office/home office (SOHO) routers have been found to be using vulnerable versions of the Allegro RomPager embedded web server. Allegro RomPager versions prior to 4.34 contain a vulnerability in cookie processing code that can be leveraged to grant attackers administrative privileges on the device. Cert.org

Our 6TB hard drive face-off Backblaze is transitioning from using 4 TB hard drives to 6 TB hard drives in the Storage Pods we will be deploying over the coming months. With over 10,000 hard drives needing to be purchased over the next several months, the choice of which 6TB hard drive to use is critical. Let's take a look at how we're navigating this transition. Backblaze